The Inevitable: Understanding the 12 Technological Forces That Will Shape Our Future

Much of what will happen in the next 30 years is inevitable, driven by technological trends that are already in motion. In this fascinating, provocative new book, Kevin Kelly provides an optimistic road map for the future, showing how the coming changes in our lives - from virtual reality in the home to an on-demand economy to artificial intelligence embedded in everything we manufacture - can be understood as the result of a few long-term accelerating forces.

Facebook, PayPal, Alibaba, Uber - these seemingly disparate companies have upended entire industries by harnessing a single phenomenon: the platform business model. Platform Revolution delivers the first comprehensive analysis of how platforms use technology to match producers and consumers in a multisided marketplace, unlocking hidden resources and creating new forms of value. When a company like Uber connects drivers with passengers, everybody wins - except traditional cab companies, which are scrambling to survive.

The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology

For over three decades, the great inventor and futurist Ray Kurzweil has been one of the most respected and provocative advocates of the role of technology in our future. In his classic The Age of Spiritual Machines, he argued that computers would soon rival the full range of human intelligence at its best. Now he examines the next step in this inexorable evolutionary process: the union of human and machine.

The Attention Merchants: The Epic Scramble to Get Inside Our Heads

In nearly every moment of our waking lives, we face a barrage of advertising enticements, branding efforts, sponsored social media, commercials and other efforts to harvest our attention. Over the last century, few times or spaces have remained uncultivated by the "attention merchants", contributing to the distracted, unfocused tenor of our times. Tim Wu argues that this is not simply the byproduct of recent inventions, but the end result of more than a century's growth and expansion in the industries that feed on human attention.

Why Information Grows: The Evolution of Order, from Atoms to Economies

What is economic growth? And why, historically, has it occurred in only a few places? Previous efforts to answer these questions have focused on institutions, geography, finances, and psychology. But according to MIT's anti-disciplinarian César Hidalgo, understanding the nature of economic growth demands transcending the social sciences and including the natural sciences of information, networks, and complexity. To understand the growth of economies, Hidalgo argues, we first need to understand the growth of order.

The Industries of the Future

Leading innovation expert Alec Ross explains what's next for the world, mapping out the advances and stumbling blocks that will emerge in the next 10 years - for businesses, governments, and the global community - and how we can navigate them.

The Master Algorithm: How the Quest for the Ultimate Learning Machine Will Remake Our World

Under the aegis of machine learning in our data-driven machine age, computers are programming themselves and learning about - and solving - an extraordinary range of problems, from the mundane to the most daunting. Today it is machine learning programs that enable Amazon and Netflix to predict what users will like, Apple to power Siri's ability to understand voices, and Google to pilot cars.

Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind

One hundred thousand years ago, at least six human species inhabited the Earth. Today there is just one. Us. Homo sapiens. How did our species succeed in the battle for dominance? Why did our foraging ancestors come together to create cities and kingdoms? How did we come to believe in gods, nations, and human rights; to trust money, books, and laws; and to be enslaved by bureaucracy, timetables, and consumerism?

Where Good Ideas Come From: The Natural History of Innovation

What sparks the flash of brilliance? How does groundbreaking innovation happen? Answering in his infectious, culturally omnivorous style, using his fluency in fields from neurobiology to popular culture, Johnson provides the complete, exciting, and encouraging story of how we generate the ideas that push our careers, our lives, our society, and our culture forward.

Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies

Superintelligence asks the questions: What happens when machines surpass humans in general intelligence? Will artificial agents save or destroy us? Nick Bostrom lays the foundation for understanding the future of humanity and intelligent life. The human brain has some capabilities that the brains of other animals lack. It is to these distinctive capabilities that our species owes its dominant position. If machine brains surpassed human brains in general intelligence, then this new superintelligence could become extremely powerful - possibly beyond our control.

Superforecasting: The Art and Science of Prediction

Everyone would benefit from seeing further into the future, whether buying stocks, crafting policy, launching a new product, or simply planning the week's meals. Unfortunately, people tend to be terrible forecasters. As Wharton professor Philip Tetlock showed in a landmark 2005 study, even experts' predictions are only slightly better than chance. However, an important and underreported conclusion of that study was that some experts do have real foresight.

Abundance: The Future Is Better Than You Think

We will soon be able to meet and exceed the basic needs of every man, woman, and child on the planet. Abundance for all is within our grasp. This bold, contrarian view, backed up by exhaustive research, introduces our near-term future, where exponentially growing technologies and three other powerful forces are conspiring to better the lives of billions of people. This book is an antidote to pessimism by tech-entrepreneur-turned-philanthropist Peter H. Diamandis and award-winning science writer Steven Kotler.

Ego Is the Enemy

"While the history books are filled with tales of obsessive visionary geniuses who remade the world in their images with sheer, almost irrational force, I've found that history is also made by individuals who fought their egos at every turn, who eschewed the spotlight, and who put their higher goals above their desire for recognition." (From the prologue)

Pre-Suasion: Channeling Attention for Change

The author of the legendary best seller Influence, social psychologist Robert Cialdini, shines a light on effective persuasion and reveals that the secret doesn't lie in the message itself but in the key moment before that message is delivered.

Algorithms to Live By: The Computer Science of Human Decisions

All our lives are constrained by limited space and time, limits that give rise to a particular set of problems. What should we do, or leave undone, in a day or a lifetime? How much messiness should we accept? What balance of new activities and familiar favorites is the most fulfilling? These may seem like uniquely human quandaries, but they are not: computers, too, face the same constraints, so computer scientists have been grappling with their version of such problems for decades.

Humans Need Not Apply: A Guide to Wealth and Work in the Age of Artificial Intelligence

After billions of dollars and 50 years of effort, researchers are finally cracking the code on artificial intelligence. As society stands on the cusp of unprecedented change, Jerry Kaplan unpacks the latest advances in robotics, machine learning, and perception powering systems that rival or exceed human capabilities. Driverless cars, robotic helpers, and intelligent agents that promote our interests have the potential to usher in a new age of affluence and leisure.

Blockchain Revolution: How the Technology Behind Bitcoin Is Changing Money, Business, and the World

The technology likely to have the greatest impact on the future of the world economy has arrived, and it's not self-driving cars, solar energy, or artificial intelligence. It's called the blockchain. The first generation of the digital revolution brought us the Internet of information. The second generation - powered by blockchain technology - is bringing us the Internet of value: a new, distributed platform that can help us reshape the world of business and transform the old order of human affairs for the better.

The story of the bullet-shaped SpaceShipOne and the other teams in the hunt is an extraordinary tale of making the impossible possible. It is driven by outsized characters - Burt Rutan, Richard Branson, John Carmack, Paul Allen - and obsessive pursuits. In the end, as Diamandis dreamed, the result wasn't just a victory for one team; it was the foundation for a new industry and a new age.

How to Create a Mind: The Secret of Human Thought Revealed

Ray Kurzweil, the bold futurist and author of the New York Times best seller The Singularity Is Near, is arguably today’s most influential technological visionary. A pioneering inventor and theorist, he has explored for decades how artificial intelligence can enrich and expand human capabilities. Now, in his much-anticipated How to Create a Mind, he takes this exploration to the next step: reverse-engineering the brain to understand precisely how it works, then applying that knowledge to create vastly intelligent machines.

The Evolution of Everything: How New Ideas Emerge

The Evolution of Everything is about bottom-up order and its enemy, the top-down twitch - the endless fascination human beings have with design rather than evolution, with direction rather than emergence. Drawing on anecdotes from science, economics, history, politics, and philosophy, Matt Ridley's wide-ranging, highly opinionated opus demolishes conventional assumptions that major scientific and social imperatives are dictated by those on high.

Rise of the Robots: Technology and the Threat of a Jobless Future

In a world of self-driving cars and big data, smart algorithms and Siri, we know that artificial intelligence is getting smarter every day. Though all these nifty devices and programs might make our lives easier, they're also well on their way to making "good" jobs obsolete. A computer winning Jeopardy might seem like a trivial, if impressive, feat, but the same technology is making paralegals redundant as it undertakes electronic discovery, and is soon to do the same for radiologists.

Anything You Want: 40 Lessons for a New Kind of Entrepreneur

When anyone can start a business (when everyone is running their career like a business), it begs a question. This is your one chance at life, you can have anything you want, what is worth doing? Most people don't know why they're doing what they're doing. They imitate others, go with the flow, and follow paths without making their own. They spend decades in pursuit of something that someone convinced them they should want, without realizing that it won't make them happy. Anything You Want is a manifesto about living life, appreciating enough, and doing what matters.

The Daily Stoic: 366 Meditations on Wisdom, Perseverance, and the Art of Living

Why have history's greatest minds - from George Washington to Frederick the Great to Ralph Waldo Emerson along with today's top performers, from Super Bowl-winning football coaches to CEOs and celebrities - embraced the wisdom of the ancient Stoics? Because they realize that the most valuable wisdom is timeless and that philosophy is for living a better life, not a classroom exercise. The Daily Stoic offers a daily devotional of Stoic insights and exercises, featuring all-new translations.

Audible Editor Reviews

Cutting-edge technology watchdog Kevin Kelly has done it again. It is no longer silly to think of technology as having a pulse, and the former editor of Wired magazine certainly has his finger on it. In this compelling new view of the many parallels between biological development in humans and humans' development of technology, the interconnectedness of the biosophere and the technium has never been so clear. Supergeeks rejoice, not only for this exciting speculation on what our future holds, but also for the fact that it is narrated by the one and only Paul Boehmer, a terrific Shakespearean actor better known for his role as stranded Vulcan in one of the most beloved eipsodes of Star Trek: Enterprise.

Boehmer gives voice to this deep scientific inquiry with energy and precision. Kelly is keen on researching a breadth of evidences to secure his theory about what technology wants from us, and Boehmer steps lightly through the many lists of supporting examples in a tone that shows just how captivating they are. Did you know that rock ants have a system for calculating the volume of a room, in order determine the appropriate dimensions of the nest they want to build? Did you know that the Amish are in a heated debate over the possible adoption of cell phones? Did you know that a toaster makes decisions? The scope of Kelly's considerations is astounding.

This comprehensive look at technology as a near-living system will shock and delight both luddites and technophiles alike. Kelly's previous major work, Out of Control, was at the top of the Wachowski brothers' required reading list for actors in their Matrix film trilogy. This time around, the first few chapters are almost like watching the evolutionary montage that opens Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey. Perhaps the futuristic trajectory of Kelly's book is slightly more optimistic and his conclusion somewhat more scientific, but given the mirror of Kubrick's film, Trekkie Paul Boehmer is the perfect choice of narrator for this weirdly wonderful book. Megan Volpert

Publisher's Summary

This provocative book introduces a brand-new view of technology. It suggests that technology as a whole is not a jumble of wires and metal but a living, evolving organism that has its own unconscious needs and tendencies. Kevin Kelly looks out through the eyes of this global technological system to discover "what it wants." He uses vivid examples from the past to trace technology's long course and then follows a dozen trajectories of technology into the near future to project where technology is headed.

This new theory of technology offers three practical lessons: By listening to what technology wants, we can better prepare ourselves and our children for the inevitable technologies to come; by adopting the principles of proaction and engagement, we can steer technologies into their best roles; and by aligning ourselves with the long-term imperatives of this near-living system, we can capture its full gifts.

Written in intelligent and accessible language, this is a fascinating, innovative, and optimistic look at how humanity and technology join to produce increasing opportunities in the world and how technology can give our lives greater meaning.

"If there's justice, it will win the Pulitzer Prize." --Seth Godin
"Nuh uh." -- me
I was suprised at how many scientific errors Mr. Kelly commits in laying out his thesis for this book. His thesis is solid, but he frequently and unnecessarily distorts scientific theory to support it. He clumsily argues that evolution has direction, citing prominent scientists like Richard Dawkins, despite that Dawkins has long asserted that any perceived destination for evolution results simply from our own narcissistic perspective. Kelly also uses several erroneous cliches about the history of human evolution to support his thesis. By the end of the book, I was disappointed that Kelly so poorly argued such an important thesis. For lack of better editors, this book ends up stuck between popular psychology and scholarly thought.

Kevin Kelly's contemplation of meaning, couched in terms of the "Technium" (all technology and its trends), which includes our minds, life itself, and indeed all the cosmos.

I like Kelly's description of history and the aforementioned contemplation of existence better than I like his assessment of present technology, or his transition to potential futures and proscriptive ways of living, but there were parts from each perspective I enjoyed and agreed with throughout the book.

That said, much of the best elaborated ideas are borrowed from contemporaries (e.g. techno-futurist Kurzweil), and what Kelly does try and establish himself is a mixed bag. I found myself alternately nodding vigorously in agreement and then shaking my head disappointedly at vague language, unjustified leaps, occasionally excessive proselytizing. In most cases I wanted Kelly to take the discussion he had built up so well in a different direction, and we diverged more frequently than I had expected to at the outset.

The book feels like it could be stronger in progression and thesis if it maintained a steady philosophical position throughout, but Kelly comes across as trying hard to reconcile his personal ambivalence over how to handle technology. He issues statements that fit nicely into prevailing Western scientific thought, only to act as if it were never said in a later chapter, letting Eastern philosophical wisdom and personal reflection do all the talking instead. My discomfort doesn't stem from his choosing one way of thinking over the other per se, but in his inconsistency. Perhaps over the seven years that Kelly wrote the book he changed his mind and mood back and forth, writing a chapter or two when his views leaned enough one way or the other. I wonder if he's not yet confidently settled on an ideology for himself, let alone the Technium, but if nothing else this informed self-discussion does make for a worthwhile read.

What was the most interesting aspect of this story? The least interesting?

I think the most interesting chapter by far was on Amish hackers, a seemingly contradictory phrase the author invokes to describe some original research he's done interviewing various Amish on how they decide whether to use or reject a particular portion of technology.A disappointing pastiche of New Age ideas layered on regurgitated Jacob Bonowski, Richard Dawkins and James Burke, occasionally invoking flawed logic on pop-science as well. The author enjoys making up new words, such as "technium" for the aggregate of all technology currently in use, as a substitute for actual insight. Ultimately, there really isn't much of a conclusion beyond "think about what technology you decide to embrace".

How did the narrator detract from the book?

I'd also like to say... that I found the narrator... especially annoying,... speaking slowly... with lengthy pauses between phrases... in a tone that suggests.... an overdose of Valium. Like daddy reading patiently to a small child. I had to crank the playback up to 2x speed just to avoid falling asleep between sentences.

What reaction did this book spark in you? Anger, sadness, disappointment?

Interesting book with a lot of food for thought about how technology shapes us, as we in turn shape it. In essence, technology is part of human evolution, and we could no more stop technological process from happening than we could stop the sun from rising tomorrow.

As food for thought the book is a good read, but he lays out so many questionable ideas as fact that his overall judgment is necessarily in question. A sign of wisdom, and prudence is when someone can hold strong beliefs on questionable ideas, and not lose sight that despite their own conviction on the matter, it is still a questionable idea to others. This is the only way to avoid confirmation bias and thus turning ourselves into our own worst intellectually enemies. Once we’ve given ourselves over to such biases, we lose the ability to self-monitor our ideas for soundness.

In context to the “Golden Rule” of treating others as we would like to be treated, he flatly declares that including non-human species into this realm of “others” is moral progress. This isn’t just up for debate still, but Kelly places himself on the true outer fringes here. The logical conclusion to this line of thought is that killing an animal for food is equal to killing a human for food. Bringing such ideas to the table for discussion is all well and good, but again, he doesn’t present it as something to be considered, but states it as settled fact.

So the book itself is interesting, and I don't regret getting it, but Kelly is so sealed up within his own ideas that they all take on a rather surreal aspect, and so it's hard to take as seriously as I'm sure he expects it to be taken.

Kevin Kelly's book is a mind-opening look at technology as an extension of the complex, upward-spiral of life and ecology. This book truly broadened my definition of technology and, indeed, life itself.

An excellent read; I would highly recommend it to anyone interested in technology but perhaps, even more so, to biologist, ecologist, and system theorists.

As a technology professional, I found this book to one of the more important books I had read (Steven Pinker, Malcolm Gladwell, Nassim Taleb). It provides an extrapolation of the speed, the pattern, and the vision of humanity future (albeit not a good one). I will take the blue pill...

It was interesting how technology has adapted over the years, decades and centuries, but Kevin Kelly goes on and on where you tend to forget his thesis. It seems like he just wrote this book just to ramble on his thoughts on the subject. If he was defending his thesis in a PHD setting, the thesis would be rejected because it's just too much random ideas with no collaboration on one thought. You really get lost in the read because one minute he is talking about how Microsoft Windows and it's million lines of coding and the next chapter, he is explaining about evolution and cells and trying to tie everything together. Very awkward to understand the complete process. The only redeeming part of the book is about the Amish and technology. This could had been a really good personal commentary, but it was poorly edited and badly executed.

I read widely in the areas of technology, innovation, and the social aspects of networking. Kevin Kelly’s “What Technology Wants” took me by surprise. It took me at least into the proverbial “deep end of the pool.” Easy to understand and follow, Kelly approaches technology from the perspective of the “technium”. Technium is the label he attaches to the globalized, interconnected stage of technological development. He approaches technology and innovation, then from this unusual perspective. If I follow, Kelly suggests that technology (technium) is the sum total of man’s progress – the thousands of years of progress. He also broadly defines technology in terms of nonhuman species as well. This is a very thought provoking book with many implications. It is well written though the listener may want to review sections periodically. It is approachable by anyone with a passing interest and nontechnical background. The narration of Paul Boehmer is very good as well. Audible fans may want to couple Kelly’s book with Steven Johnson’s “Where Good Ideas Come From” and Clay Shirky’s “Cognitive Surplus.” Both of those books consider parallel issues. In sum, Kelly has provided Audible listeners a great service with “What Technology Wants.” I look forward to seeing more from him in the future.

I think you should read What Technology Wants and decide for yourself if Kelly is saying anything new or interesting.

For me, Kelly's idea of "the technium", the overarching theme of the book, never quite came together. In describing all of technological change (in the broadest sense of the word) within a unified framework, Kelly, to my ears (I listened to the book from Audible), ends up explaining very little. The saying, "all models are wrong, but some are useful" is only half right in describing Kelly's "technium."

If I didn't like the theme of 'What Technology Wants' (or maybe didn't get it) - I really enjoyed many of its parts. The description of Amish technology was fascinating and thought provoking. Kelly's observations on the digital divide (he is not worried), the benefits to society of early adopters (they use expensive and bad tools so everyone else can use cheap and excellent tools), and the benefits of appropriate technology (Kelly does not Tweet, own a TV, or use a laptop or smart phone), are consistently challenging and smart.

I wish that Kelly spent more time talking to more people (say people who work for technology companies, or even toil in post-secondary education) and less time in his own head. Too much is made of the Unabomber manifesto, too little is made of the history of technological change and the shifts in material, economic and social life.

Despite these complaints, I see What Technology Wants as a good companion piece to my other recent books. The Master Switch: The Rise and Fall of Information Empires; The Rational Optimist: How Prosperity Evolves; Sonic Boom: Globalization at Mach Speed; I Live in the Future & Here's How It Works: Why Your World, Work, and Brain Are Being Creatively Disrupted; and Where Good Ideas Come From: The Natural History of Innovation are all better books, but each is made more interesting by thinking about What Technology Wants.